A scribe leans over a damp pile of wooden slips, ink smudging his fingers as he picks a Chinese character to stand in for a Korean name. You can hear traders outside, and he's racing to finish the tax list before the sun drops.
After Han forces smashed Gojoseon (고조선) in 108 BC, they set up the Lelang commandery (낙랑군) along the peninsula. The Han ran a full bureaucracy, and that meant paperwork, seals, and little wooden tags for everything from grain to conscript lists. Local scribes had to make Chinese characters record local words, and they picked their tools fast and weird.
Those scribes didn't just copy characters for their meaning. They grabbed characters for sound, they stuck one character to stand for a Korean verb ending, they mixed and matched like people trying to text in a new language. Over time those tricks got a name, and scholars link them to the later Idu (이두) way of writing Korean with Chinese signs. You'd see the same odd fixes in tomb epitaphs and official slips, where grammar didn't line up but communication still happened.
Archaeologists have dug up wooden tags, roof tiles, seal imprints and short inscriptions from old Lelang sites and nearby tombs, dated between about 100 BC and the fourth century AD. Those finds show officials keeping lists, filing lawsuits, and recording names in a messy half-Chinese, half-Korean script. It's proof that Koreans were improvising a written form centuries before anyone made a script for Korean sounds.
Centuries later, King Sejong (세종대왕) would make Hangul so people wouldn't have to hack Chinese anymore. But that invention came after a long history of living with imperfect tools. Those early scribes taught themselves, and they'd shown everyone that language wants a script that fits it.
If you text in Korean today, you're using a solution that grew out of centuries of paper hacks and stubborn scribes. Ancient bureaucrats would probably laugh at how clean our fonts are, and they'd totally get our emoji shortcuts.